Safer Internet Day (SID) is organised in the UK by the UK Safer Internet Centre in February of each year to promote safe responsible use of online technology and mobile phones for children and young people. Safer Internet Day 2013 – the tenth edition of the event – will take place on Tuesday 5th February 2013, with the theme of Online Rights and Responsibilities, encouraging users to ‘Connect with Respect”.

The UK Safer Internet Centre is a partnership of three leading charitable organisations, Childnet International, the South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL) and the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). These organisations are committed to working to make a safer and better internet). All partners recognise the unparalleled opportunities the internet offers and actively encourage its positive use for social, leisure, economic and educational advancement. The partners all work towards the Childnet target; to make the Internet a great and safe place for children. The UK Safer Internet Centre is online at www.saferinternet.org.uk.

Following a tour of the House of Lords kindly organised by Lord Knight, a Trustee of the e-Learning Foundation, the children received their awards. A total of 2,824 and 50,842 students took part in the competition so the winners had a great deal to be proud of.

Over two days the competition tested curriculum challenges and mental maths, and winners were recognised in several categories including Top Student, Top Class and Top School for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Launched at the Nottingham Conference centre today, Good for Learning is a new e-learning portal from the e-Learning Foundation education charity, working in partnership with Autology*, providing access to a wealth of education content for teachers and pupils as well as providing a growing source of information and resources for parents who want to support their children’s education. For about 10p per child, a Secondary School or Academy can provide every child with the means to conduct safe and relevant searches, and provide every parent with a growing set of information and resources to help them support their children’s learning.

Valerie Thompson, Chief Executive of the e-Learning Foundation, says the new portal addresses three widely recognised issues:

“First of all, we know from the feedback we get from parents, that many are really keen to support their children’s education and help them achieve their potential, but often find it hard to know where to go for advice and information.  Secondly, schools recognise the importance of effective parental engagement, but don’t always find it easy to get right.

Finally, the amount of digital education content available via the Web is growing at an astronomical rate. Traditional search engines struggle to deliver good quality and relevant educational content; so search results for classroom based activity and homework can be frustrating, distracting, time wasting and sometimes inappropriate. “

A solution to these three issues can be found in the Good for Learning portal that provides all the resources of the Autology* service, including the powerful Autonomy search tool, and adds to it a growing body of information that is invaluable for parents and carers wanting to support their children’s education.

Good for Learning is loaded onto the school VLE so that every pupil and parent with VLE access can enjoy free and unlimited use of the resources provided.

Finding the right content is straightforward using a simple search window where the learner is asked to enter a detailed description of what they are looking for, with the option to refine the search by age and/or subject. The results delivered are relevant, comprehensive, and safe.

Information for parents already covers a wide range of issues, and will be added to on a regular basis.

The annual school licence is just £99 +VAT and the information can be made available to every pupil and parents through the school’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).  

Visit www.goodforlearning.org.uk for a free trial.

London, UK, November 2012 – Xirrus®, the leader in high-performance wireless networking, today announced the launch of its nationwide UK “Art-of-Wi-Fi” Competition. The initiative will help students develop the creative skills they need for today’s technology-driven economy, including digital art, animation and coding.  Students will be invited to submit their digital designs and enter the competition to win their school £10,000.

Entries will be based on visual interpretations of the themes ‘How Technology Helps Me Learn’ or ‘The Future Classroom’. Pupils from UK schools will create art and animations using smartphones, tablets and computers powered by wireless networks. Entries will be uploaded to a competition microsite in an attempt to build Britain’s largest virtual children’s art exhibition.

Shane Buckley, CEO of Xirrus said: “Technology has the power to unleash a new wave of creativity and learning in the school environment.  Wireless technology can expand your horizon, whether you’re a teacher, a pupil, a business, a school, or anyone that wants to get online and be connected. We hope that by showcasing the best of art and technology combined, we can send a message to the UK, and beyond, that great connections can enable great achievements.”

Support from the Education Community
The competition boasts a prestigious panel of judges, including former Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Estelle Morris, who is a patron of the e-Learning Foundation. Additional judges include film producer and CoderDojo ambassador Lord David Puttnam and Stephen Heppell, leading online education expert and Professor of New Media Environments, Bournemouth University. Other key supporters of the initiative include Xirrus Platinum Reseller Partner Academia as well as Autodesk and CoderDojo. 

"We all know technology is an important part of teaching and education, but the most exciting thing about it is when we see technology working seamlessly with teachers' and pupils' creativity. There are some amazing talents waiting to be discovered through the Art-of-Wi-Fi and I can't wait to see the entries starting to come in," said Estelle Morris

Stephen adds: "No one really knows how good our children can be, but when we surprise them with great challenges, they astonish us right back with their ingenuity. This is such an exciting competition."

Building skills for digital workplace
“The “Art-of-Wi-Fi” competition provides a fantastic opportunity to bring important digital skills into the classroom,” said CoderDojo ambassador Lord David Puttnam. “The failure to emphasise the importance of programming skills within the  core curriculum puts at risk the future job prospects of a whole generation of bright young students, many of whom will find themselves disadvantaged in the competition for the most desirable, and well paid areas of employment."

"Technology plays an important role in our lives and should be incorporated into the education of our children, to develop the skills they will need in today’s digital workplace,” agrees Matthew Bell, UK Secondary Education Manager at Autodesk, a 3D design company that provides free software to students.  “This competition will inspire students to use new technologies at school and outside the classroom,” he added.

Getting Involved
Schools can get involved from today by signing up to the Art-of-Wi-Fi microsite www.artofwifi.co.uk and requesting a login for their school. The competition will also be supported by a roadshow starting in December, where Xirrus will visit schools to help students learn about digital art and coding.  The winners will be announced at an awards evening to be held at the Saatchi Gallery in London in October 2013, where the winning pieces will be displayed. Xirrus announced a relationship with the Saatchi Gallery earlier in 2012 and is a Corporate Patron of the gallery.

As Surface Goes on Sale,
Microsoft Seeks to Reinvent the Tablet

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Schools receive extra cash through the premium for every child registered as eligible for free school meals (FSM) at any point in the past six years and children in care who have been looked after for six months.

Safer Internet Day 2013 needs your help

What's it all about?
For Safer Internet Day 2013, the UK Safer Internet Centre is giving children and young people the opportunity to tell the government and internet industry what they believe their online rights are.

They have launched the Safer Internet Day 'Have your Say' survey, which asks children and young people from the UK to consider what they believe will make the internet a better place, also giving them the chance to reflect on their own online responsibilities, considering how the way they act online can affect their own and other people's online experiences.

They will present the collated views and opinions of children and young people across the UK to the government on Safer Internet Day.

How can you take part?
They have developed surveys for primary age (7-11 years) and secondary age (11-18 years) pupils. The survey shouldn't take a class longer than 30 mins to fill in, and is available for completion or download, with guidance notes on the Safer Internet Centre's website at www.saferinternet.org.uk/survey.
You can help them to raise the voice of children and young people around the UK by encouraging your school or group to complete the survey by 31st October 2012.

If you have any questions about the survey, please do feel free to email hannah@childnet.com who will be able to help.

• Full details

If you love Mathletics but wish it could be used on your iPads, well very soon it will be possible. It will be available to download on the App Store from the 9th October.

• www.mathletics.co.uk

Schools, colleges and universities are being offered a free enterprise level app publishing platform for mobile devices.

Young mobile app developers will be offered free access to Weejot.com, the the app publishing platform from Jadu. The company plans to offer the tool to schools, colleges and universities nationwide, following a trial in Suffolk, run in partnership with Suffolk County Council.

Weejot.com enables both technical and non-technical users to create and publish mobile apps, without the need for approval through app stores. Weejot.com can be used by budding developers to improve their programming skills using HTML5 and JavaScript.

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• Visit the site

Schools have the potential to apply interventions that focus on those children lagging behind, but many are choosing to apply interventions that are not effective, and ignore those that evidence suggests will work. The Government’s “laissez faire” strategy on schools spending the Pupil Premium is highlighted as a major risk to reductions in the attainment gap, as is the temptation to use the funds for a one-off intervention just before GCSEs, rather than applying a series of interventions starting at pre-school. “

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e-Learning Foundation Olympic Legacy Programme

Selected primary schools in the host boroughs including Barking & Dagenham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich and Waltham Forest have ordered the laptops, which will be branded with a special London 2012 Olympic Games Badge, for every child in a selected year group. A small number will also go to the Children’s Hospital School at Great Ormond Street Hospital. The laptops will have been used by the workforce running the 2012 Games to support various operations such as games management, competition scores, reception, information queries, broadcaster support, media centres and the itinerary for each athlete. The laptops will then be cleaned and refurbished so they are ready for children to use and are anticipated to be delivered to the schools in late autumn. They will come with a one year warranty and will cost a fraction of their original price.

The main condition for schools acquiring the laptops was that they must be prepared to work with the e-Learning Foundation to establish a sustainable programme for 1:1 provision, involving parents as well as school funds, so that future generations of pupils can also benefit from having their own computer for their schoolwork, homework, coursework and revision – extending the legacy of London 2012 into the future.

The e-Learning Foundation has been granted the Inspire mark by the London 2012 Inspire programme which recognises innovative and exceptional projects that are directly inspired by the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Valerie Thompson, Chief Executive of the e-Learning Foundation says: “This is a really exciting opportunity for these schools to be part of the London 2012 legacy. It would have been easy just to give these away, but by requiring that the school makes a commitment to continuing an e-learning programme, we are building the foundations of a sustainable programme rather than a one-off hand-out. Schools with relatively high free school meals figures will be able to deploy some of their Pupil Premium funds to ensure that every child in the selected year has the same opportunity to have an “Olympic Games laptop” while inviting all the parents to make a modest contribution towards the cost of the programme.

“All sorts of new and exciting learning opportunities become possible once every child has home and school access to technology. Teachers will be able to do things they were previously prevented from doing because of the digital divide and patchy home access. We are proud to have been selected to participate in this important legacy programme and look forward to working with the participating schools.”

The e-Learning Foundation are pleased to support
the Xirrus as a key partner on their new
‘Art of Wifi’ UK Schools Competition.

Launching in October 2012, the Xirrus Art of WiFi UK Schools Competition will give one UK school the opportunity to win £10,000 by demonstrating its love of art, its passion for technology and the array of incredible talent within UK schools.

Following the theme “how technology helps me learn”, pupils from primary and secondary schools will create art using tablet computers and upload it to a special Xirrus Art of WiFi microsite as part of an attempt to build Britain’s largest virtual classroom art exhibition.

The competition is being supported by some of Xirrus’s key partners and a prestigious panel of judges, including the former Secretary of State for Education & Skills, Estelle Morris, who is a patron of the e-Learning Foundation and who also held office as Minister for the Arts, and Stephen Heppell, CEO of policy and learning consultancy Heppell.net, Professor of New Media Environments, Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University and visiting professor of Design at Universidad Camilo José Cela, Madrid. Stephen is recognised internationally as a pioneer in the fields of learning, new media and technology, and is at the heart of creativity in the UK, sitting on the boards of BAFTA and Creative Skillset.

The winners will be announced at an awards evening
to be held at the Saatchi Gallery in London in October 2013

Technology has the power to unleash a new wave of creativity and learning in the school environment, which is why Xirrus is holding the Art of WiFi Competition: to celebrate the excellence of teaching and creativity today, while demonstrating the possibilities technology has to offer tomorrow.

“We all know technology is an important part of teaching and education,” said Estelle Morris. “But the most exciting thing about it is when we see technology working seamlessly with teachers’ and pupils’ creativity. There are some amazing talents waiting to be discovered by the Art of WiFi and I can’t wait to see the entries starting to come in.”

Stephen comments: "No one really knows how good our children can be, but when we surprise them with great challenges, they astonish us right back with their ingenuity. This is such an exciting competition."

Shane Buckley, CEO of Xirrus said: “Wireless technology can expand your horizons, whether you’re a teacher, a pupil, a business, a school, or anyone that wants to get online and be connected. We hope that by showcasing the best of art and technology combined, we can send a message to the UK, and beyond, that great connections can enable great achievements.

Full details can be found at: www.artofwifi.co.uk

• See more information

There are the things we have to do, like cutting the deficit to keep the economy safe. There are the opportunities we cannot miss, like cleaning up the relationship between politicians and the media; reforming party funding; modernising the House of Lords.

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In the few short months since Michael Wilshaw left Mossbourne for Ofsted, he has managed to alienate almost the entire teaching profession by showing himself to be wildly out of touch with teaching today.

So much so in fact, that he chose to visit a £30k a year public school yesterday to deliver another statement designed to anger the teaching profession. Dare I say that if he went elsewhere he may not have been welcomed with open arms.

What did he tell the Brighton College Education Conference of independent school heads? He said teaching jobs weren't stressful. He legitimately pointed out that not having a job was pretty stressful, that having more than one job was also pretty stressful but then he went all Monty Python on us.

"Stress is what I was under when I started as a head in 1985, in the context of widespread industrial action – teachers walking out of class at a moment's notice – doing lunch duty on my own every day for three years."

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‘The e-Learning Foundation would accept that inappropriate use of mobile phones should be dealt with by schools. However banning a technology that has such potential for learning, communication and child safety appears excessive. A ‘Luddite approach’ to modern technologies simply misses the point – mobile devices are here to stay and our schools should be helping young people to use them appropriately, effectively and with consideration. ’

If you would like to contact us to discuss how to deploy modern technologies to the benefit of both the students and the school please email us on: info@e-learningfoundation.com

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The current ICT curriculum, which teaches how to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations, is to be scrapped and replaced with one focused on computer science and programming.

Announcing a consultation on the reform in January, Gove said there is a significant and growing base of evidence, not least from Ofsted inspections, demonstrating there persistent problems with the quality and effectiveness of ICT education in schools.

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Chris Baldwin is the Progress Leader of Year 7, teacher of music and co-ordinator of Opening Minds at William Allitt secondary school and here raves about a groundbreaking curriculum that has triggered a learning revolution in his school.

The English education system has received its fair share of sensationalism in the press over the years, which has led to some people to have skewed ideas on what schools are really about.

The image of poorly managed, failing and crumbling institutions full of scandal and intrigue has threatened to blot out the reality for the majority of schools.

Well, let's put all this to bed shall we? I am proud to say I am a teacher. I am a Progress Leader of Year 7 (Head of Year), and I co-ordinate an innovative groundbreaking conceptualised curriculum called Opening Minds, which I have an overwhelming urge to tell people about. So here's how it really is...

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There's an old saying in business: if you don't know who the sucker in a room is, it's probably you. A similar adage can be applied to technology: if you don't know how to control the systems you're using, these systems are probably controlling you. As John Naughton argues in his special report for this week's New Review, Britain is in danger of producing a generation of technological suckers: people who know how to word process a letter, buy apps for their iPhones and to search in Google, but have no understanding of the inner workings of these services.

This is, above all, an issue of education and training. For more than a decade, the teaching of information technology in schools has focused on using software rather than understanding systems; and on treating computers more like magical boxes than tools to be programmed and critiqued. With the government's recent decision to throw away this old syllabus and replace it with something better fit for 21st-century purpose, we have an opportunity to rectify a dangerous imbalance and set a new standard. It's an opportunity we can ill afford to miss – and that touches on some of the most fundamental questions surrounding what role computer technologies can, and should, play in 21st-century life.

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A survey by LapSafe of 100 UK schools, colleges and universities found that 27 per cent had IT equipment stolen in 2011, and while 83 per cent had an ICT security policy in place, 19 per cent did not include guidelines for physically securing devices.

Laptops were the most common devices to be stolen over the three-year period (42 per cent), with 11 per cent of institutions victim to netbook theft since 2009. Only four per cent reported tablet computer theft.

Denise Crouch, director at LapSafe Products, said: “Our research suggests that theft of laptops and other mobile ICT devices from UK schools, colleges and universities is on the rise. Although the exact reasons for this increase are unclear, it is likely that the economic downturn and the fact that education establishments are often hotbeds of technology are somewhat responsible.

“It is vital that educators have sufficient plans in place to reduce the risk of mobile ICT theft. This should include measures for physically securing laptops, netbooks and tablets, and should be supported by regular IT security training to help avoid the negative consequences of having devices stolen.”

• Read the survey details from LapSafe

Merlin John writes:
Does the Government need a policy or strategy for learning with ICT?    ...it seems not
Michael Gove MP at BETT 2012

How strange that, so soon after education secretary Michael Gove MP finally acknowledged the importance of technology for education, and pledged a shake-up of the ICT curriculum and computer studies in his speech at BETT 2012, the Department for Education appears to have disbanded its Technology Policy Unit,

It's understood that unit team leader Vanessa Pittard, who also had responsibility for science, has moved to cover STEM (science, technology and maths) and her four other team members are to be redeployed elsewhere because a DfE review of the unit considers there is "no business need in year ahead".

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After feedback from headteachers, chairs and clerks, SGOSS has developed its Online Governor Recruitment Service to allow schools to register their vacancies on their website. This package also provides access to resources for parent governor recruitment. The Online Governor Recruitment Service is completely free and can be accessed at www.sgoss.org.uk/schools.

Schools Minister Lord Hill said:
“School governors play a key role in driving up standards in our schools and so I am very grateful for the work that the School Governors One-Stop Shop (SGOSS) does.

Their new Online Governor Recruitment Service is the first of its kind, providing an online resource to support schools’ recruitment of all types of governors. Schools will be able to use the self-help tool to help them find a new governor with the skills they need. It will also give them the opportunity to think about the structure and capacity of school management, helping with school improvement.” For more information about the School Governors’ One Stop Shop, visit www.sgoss.org.uk.

It may be a story from South Africa but it is a story that resonates in the UK.

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The pupils of Chesterton Community College ICT class have been invited to road-test the long-awaited Raspberry Pi computer.

A projector throws the image of what the Pi is generating - a simple game of Snake (available on any Nokia phone near you) - onto a whiteboard. The atmosphere is feverish as the 12 year olds compete for the keyboard. Crucially, they are not just playing the game - they have created it by writing their own computer code.

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We are very pleased to welcome Keith Hanks who has joined us as our new Head of Fundraising.

Keith joins us from 'Parents and Children Together’ where he held the position of Business Development Director. He brings with him an extensive background in both IT and education as well as having worked with several charities.

Keith can be contacted on 01932 9796260 or
keith@e-learningfoundation.com

For once, the internet buzz had got it right. Apple announced iBooks 2, digital textbooks and iBooks Author. I tracked down the keynote video on You Tube and it was a typical Apple promotional video: cheesy and packed with the usual spin but undoubtedly exciting and well made.

So what does a digital textbook look like? Well, fantastic, on the evidence of LoE. Opening with an inspiring, attention-grabbing video, it is incredibly immersive. The content is excellent with plenty of text and images. There are more videos to watch, imbedded interactive Keynote presentations and a quiz at the end of the second chapter. It was certainly a very satisfying experience.

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It has helped Gowerton become the first secondary school in Wales and one of just 15 in the UK to win a Third Millennium Learning Award.

But it is not the only one in Swansea to scoop the award, because Casllwchwr Primary School has become the first Welsh primary school to receive the honour. They have integrated iPods, iPads and computers into the everyday classroom experience for pupils.

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